It's harmless, really; they're on a case, Max likes a flirt; Sam's not opposed. Max called and Sam ditched the books and his sky-pale, cranked-up, still-hacking brother and climbed in the car and drove to Canada.

Long drive, Max says.

His sister eyes them while she gathers: sage and sweetgrass and cedar; hyssop.

Dudes, Alicia says, come on.

*The woman in white (Provincial Road 201) isn’t acting like a woman in white, or like any spirit really, that they’ve seen. So, Alicia says, you know I called Dean again but—

He didn’t pick up, Max says, good you gave me your number.

He’s been sick, Sam says, so--

You said, Max says, though Sam’s not sure he did, but yeah: Dean keeled at the table when Sam hooked his elbow, took the beer gently away, told him to go to bed, and Dean did, and flopped flat, and let his brother worry up the covers.

He was getting better, Max called, better enough to try to come along.

No, Sam said, rest up. Dean's breath was brackish in the way only all those rooms and beds and years and years could say. I know no body, is what Sam thought, better than yours, and—

Not letting you forget me again.

Dean let Sam make eggs. Wouldn’t drink his tea.

Dug in a robe pocket and flipped Sam the keys.

*Max is psychic, of course, like his sister, but he'll stay out of your garden if you don't want company: relief. Sam's garden is like: gardens/garden/gardens/quantum superposition; no, well, there are too many gardens and some you'll always end in. Up in. (Like a fuzzed-out lyric Sam heard on the radio, while, strangely, they were rolling though the very brown-burnt Texas Dylan was on about: now I've never been the kinda person that likes to trespass/ but sometimes you just find yourself over the line). Like that.

Max could read Sam's palm, make him a map, if he wanted.

Still--Max won't.

*How’re you, Sam, Alicia says, though she doesn’t need to ask. Energy: sharper than her brother’s, sweet and neat like a knife in a boot.

How’s your mom? she asks.

She’s—Sam says, and Max pours out, black and thick; too hot. Alicia sugars it up, lets the light catch her amulet. Pentagram, not the usual, and when Sam doesn’t ask she says--

She tells Sam a story, then, about her daddy the fox, in off the trail, out of the snow, brushing it off his shoulders onto the magicked breath of his children. Their Sipi Cree granddaddy, their mother with her late-night fables; banesflower tea, her own recipe.

Sam thinks: family magic. Of the Loughlins, sudden--then feels the flashback shiver away.

*Something was taking truckers off the trunk roads, drawing them 201-wards, lifting them from the cold stretch between Snowflake and Sundown, Roseau Anishinabe First Nation; places they shouldn’t be, places they weren’t.

White figure in the grass, some locals said, but not so earth-lashed, had a kill-zone but otherwise—

Kind of fluid, Max says, there’s a local story, Io Bainbridge, girl who ran for the border and ran her F-150 into a tree, thirteen years ago—

But we burnt her bones last year, says Alicia.

Local cops or--? Sam says, and Max looks at him.

RCMP detachment, Alicia says, lot of crossings these days, people running from your side of the border.

Asylum-seekers, Sam says, and if America’s haunted, always, it’s never been more so, up to the ex-occupied in the White House—but he can’t talk about that.

There’ve been some fires, too, Max says. Weird heaps of roadkill. Leavings on fields and graves like some kinda muck-mined yellowcake.

Smells demony, Sam says, and the twins fix him in their headlights, blink in unison.

We thought so, Max says.

Not again, Sam says, and catches a hit of Alicia, her dog-soft recoil from the thought of possession.

Got inked up good, she says, fingers her neck.

Demons dig truckers, Sam says. Or: they like lonely roads, ghosts stories they can ride like contrails, rope the unsuspecting into hell.

Books, then bed, Alicia says.

Bed, Max says, waves a hand over the dishes, then hunt.

*Twins have a cabin in an out-of-place prairie grove; of course they do, two bedrooms, piney scent, their mother’s photos (and music Sam likes, indie, world-y, tech-y; playlists Dean’d pitch a fit at). Asa’s here, musk-heavy in the walls. Cached weapons; jangling charms, athame. Spellwork, of course. Lashings of white magic. Wards that hum and crack like a low fire.

Sam lies down on the back bed, back to the wood; salted sill, Missouri-star quilt.

Dreams: his brother’s breath, close and clean. Dean’s hands at his waistband, just at the gun.

A bed, salvia-silver sheet, and two dark heads. Himself between them, close-held.

Hands in his hair and down his spine and over his eyes. Lids. Breath-gentle.

Fingers inside him but not to—

not to crawl, creep through vertebrals and salt, or set to flame. Just to stay.

Something clean, ribs swept as a broom on a hearth. Warm mossfire, way down low --

and his brother’s breath.

*Strange Canada sunrise.

Max has coffee on again. Spelt toast with butter. Something that smells like bacon but isn’t made from meat.

Sleep well, Alicia asks. Sam looks at her and she sees his dream-doubt, sees it just as—

it’s shrugged off onto the floor, like a nightshirt.

Don’t worry, she says, we don’t dream-walk. We wouldn’t.

Unless, Max says, you want us to.

*Io Bainbridge, nineteen, pissed-off , late-teen-petty, dark-red stripe in the black of her hair(Sam read, along with a little history of the CPR, gateway to the west, Manitoba-Minnesota-North Dakota meeting, three-way fistbump on frontiers turned borders.)

Born: Notre Dame de Lourdes. Aspiring translator. Named for the Jupiter moon, which (oh, Sam thinks, is kinda made of sulfur.) Had a daughter, Pearl, father unknown; crib death at eleven months.

Wanted to raise a little hell, hit a tree. Didn’t know she’d become a demon folk hero, of sorts, but might have thought, absent the murder, that it was cool.

*Sam boots up, gears up, calls his brother and listens to him cough.

You ok?

Course, Dean says.

Need me to come home?

Nope. How’s the case?

Ask me later, Sam says, and outside the window there are birds. Chickadees, he thinks, this far south of boreal. Licks of bay fire on their striped sides. Max out there, seed and a palm for them to light on.

Fluids and bad TV, Sam says.

The worst, says his brother.

*Afternoon: surveillance, and study. Sam walking them through. Sam worrying a nail and another, a memory: dead men’s curves and California, his brother young and ghost-reckless, hot as a cedar fire. Then: a drive, plain-roads on which the twins grow older than they are, older than at Asa’s wake, young-eroded like eastern mountains—the way hunters get, and witches, and all things power flows crackling through.

Max leans on Sam’s arm, over the map up on his phone; Alicia’s Latin tingles at his ear. Then: quick-blessed blades. A bitter tea, for strength. One whiskey, that’s for--

I don’t know, Sam says, and he means: so many places in all of us already, that threaten to break at any bend, but still—Mary-Asa-Asa’s children, this story needs to bite down on its own tail, close where it began-

with a Winchester.

*Now: there are three, one for each of them (and somewhere their faux-ghost on a leash, spirit-effigy hell-dragged like a lure) and an astral hellfire Max can see, and Sam too, he blinks hard enough. Alicia keeps her counsel, crouches with her blade.

Jael’s posse wanted to draw them out, Sam said, wanted to avenge their demon-dudebro, drafted themselves to these latitudes, lodestar in an ex-vessel, maybe, made themselves a highway-game to draw the hunters out. (They could’ve just showed up, Max said, but demons gonna be demons, and Sam laughed.)

They got us now, Sam says, as they kneel, triangle, weird sister and two weird brothers in a little trash-slice of trees, hot spot next to the highway—and cauldron it up, drop the demon-draw into the fire, and watch it boil.

Max flutters at him, then goes, man, I'm sorry. I mean—you take good care of yourself but not lately, and I know, Max says, it's your brother or it’s the highway or it’s your brother and not even like that, I mean, for you it isn't--man, this is none of my business.

Sam, utterly surprised at himself, says: maybe it is.

Then, surprised again--because Max backs off and takes his wrist, rests fingers over his pulse, and the pulse beneath that one, and consternation flushes up, between his brows.

Max's fingers hover over his sternum:

May I?

I—Sam says, OK, yes.

It’s light, what Max does, young magic but not weak, greenplant quality, not bright like angels, not dark.

Faint: Oh, I'm sorry. Knot of … something, right there.

Yeah, Sam says, I know. Closes his eyes.

(Eyes outside of him, not him, say: Max is so fine. Alicia too, I mean come-to-Gaia beautiful. Smart and dark and you know, witchy: your type(s), Sammy. That's the inner-Dean, one he carries; the one that's part him, part his brother; them. Knows things.)

Oh, Sam says, and fuzzes out, and--

tingles in some of the places he's been hurt. It might be too much.

No, go ahead, Max says, and his sister’s there too.

This is what Sam comes up with: one drop of Toni’s slick afterfeel, the last blue burn of Gadreel, Lucifer’s tongue, maybe, little bit of lick-Lilith, somewhere; prison reflux: mealworm-gnawed absence-of-brother—all to choke on, up; batteryacid beads on a bile string, and Sam coughs, sways, might start to sweat. Like he might heave, but--

Two pairs of hands, close by, brace him up.

*Alicia makes him an omelet and a poultice of sorts—for spirit-stuff, she says, you put it where, well, where you feel aftermath the most. When you get home.

Wonderful! I loved seeing the twins again, especially when paired with Sam, it feels like such a natural connection between them and you captured that beautifully! I love the sense of location and magic and home too.

No, I don't think I do have any thoughts about them yet, but I'd like to know more! I loved how you had them living in a cabin surrounding by charms and magic, and you captured their connection so well. I can't help but wonder how connected they are as twins? Does magic enhance that connection? And there's something about how you link them to Sam, and then that familial connection between Mary and Asa, that I loved too. :)